Beautiful Deceptions

Three weeks after the public retraction concerning Clara Whitmore, Scarlett received an envelope containing a photograph of her brother. She recognised Nathan immediately. The stubborn angle of his chin. The crease beside his mouth that appeared when he was about to lie. He stood outside a private storage facility, holding a cardboard archive box against his chest. On the back was a date from eighteen months earlier. Nathan had disappeared almost three years ago. No body had been found. After a long search, a car abandoned near the coast and a series of messages that sounded like goodbyes, Scarlett had accepted that he was probably dead. The police had never formally confirmed his death. She had held a memorial service without a coffin because she needed somewhere to place her grief. Their mother had already died; there was no one left to insist that Nathan might still come home.

In the photograph, Nathan looked older and unmistakably alive. A second slip of paper lay beneath it. ASK DANIEL WHY HE NEVER TOLD YOU. Scarlett sat at her kitchen table in a dressing gown that cost more than her first month's rent had. Her apartment was immaculate. The flowers on the island were fresh. The silver picture frames had been polished by someone else. Everything she had assembled to suggest an enviable life looked suddenly like scenery.

She rang Daniel Cross. He answered on the fifth ring. "Scarlett." "How long have you known?" Silence. "That's an interesting greeting," he said. "Don't be clever. Not today." "What happened?" "A photograph arrived. Nathan. Eighteen months ago. Someone wrote your name on the back." She heard his breathing change. "Where are you?" he asked. "Home." "Don't send the photograph to anyone. I'll come over." "You haven't answered me." "I know."

She hung up before he could say anything else. She had spent years forgiving men for withholding the truth on the grounds that they were protecting her. The thought of doing it again made her physically ill. Daniel arrived forty minutes later, wet from the rain and carrying no notebook. Since his confession about the first threatening letter, he had stopped pretending that journalism gave him permission to trespass on people's lives. He had taken leave from the newsroom. The change had cost him his reputation with some colleagues and earned him no forgiveness from Evelyn.

He saw the photograph on the table and went still. "You recognise the building," Scarlett said. "I do." "And Nathan?" "I met him once after he disappeared." The admission landed quietly, which was worse than shouting. "Once?" "Once in person. He contacted me again through an intermediary." "You let me organise a memorial." Daniel looked down. "I didn't know about the memorial until afterwards." "You knew I thought he was dead."

"Yes." She waited for a defence. None came. "Get out," she said. "Scarlett, the reason—" "I don't want a reason that begins with the words for your own good." He put his hands at his sides. "It doesn't. It begins with Nathan asking me not to expose him because someone was threatening him. I made the wrong decision about what you deserved to know." That stopped her, not because she forgave him, but because he hadn't tried to make the decision noble.

"Who sent this?" "I don't know." "What was he carrying?" "I think it was material from Mercer's second archive." Scarlett looked at the box in her brother's arms. It bore a black symbol: a square inside a circle. She had seen the mark on old invitations, research invoices and the stationery Daniel had once used for his private notes. "You knew about another archive." "I suspected one. I couldn't prove it."